There were crowds, there were protests, there was bad weather — but the 2010 Olympics were a defining moment in Canadian history

While “The Carnival Band” plays, these strange characters dance Monday night on Robson Street in Vancouver. Restaurant sales in the downtown core of Vancouver are up 89 per cent during the Olympics.

Photograph by: Stuart Davis
, PNG

Some scoffed, some sneered, some fervently hoped the 2010 Olympics would implode in a welter of bad feeling caused by “told-you-so” congestion, crowds, elitism, price-gouging, overzealous security and protest-driven conflict.

There was congestion all right. BC Ferries was overwhelmed by people from Vancouver Island heading to the mainland to join the celebration even though surcharges pushed the price of a return trip with a car, driver and a couple of passengers to $177.50.

There were crowds — up to 20,000 a day gathering on the waterfront just to look at the Olympic flame. Even larger numbers turned out to visit various pavilions, cultural events or to just hang out and soak up the once-in-a-lifetime atmosphere. On Robson Street, the multitudes reached 150,000.

There was even elitism, although midway through, one poll found that 57 per cent of its British Columbia respondents had attended an Olympic event.

And there was protest, quite rightly drawing attention to everything from the grizzly bear hunt to homelessness. But it was, for the most part, marked by civility.

Police even reported a polite letter from a protester thanking them for their good manners and restraint during one demonstration that briefly turned nasty before the troublemakers melted away when broad support failed to materialize.

So instead of the nadir of disaster some predicted and a few wished for, despite even the pall cast by the accidental death of an athlete on the opening day, the Vancouver Games have been an apex event: peaceful, marked by boisterous good nature and — most people seem to think — a benefit to the province and the city financially, in terms of global image and in generating confidence and self-esteem.

For example, nobody seemed too perturbed by the expected irritants of transit glitches, uncooperative weather or prices. Restaurant sales in the downtown boomed, up by almost 130 per cent in Yaletown and by almost 90 per cent in downtown Vancouver.

It wasn’t just here, either. Broadcast ratings suggest that just about every TV set in Canada, perhaps on the planet, was tuned in at some point or other. Men’s hockey games against the U.S. and Canada drew more watchers than any other event in the country’s history and the Games as a whole had the same kind of draw worldwide.

More than half the U.S. population, about 167 million viewers, has watched. That pattern seems to have repeated with the rest of the world. It’s estimated that there are about 1.4 billion television receivers across the globe. Coupled with Internet and mobile media, the audience swelled to about 3.5 billion viewers. That would make the Vancouver Games one of the most watched events in human history, a marketing reach of astounding proportions.

One poll reported that a majority of Canadians not only took ownership of the 2010 Olympics — the ratio of those who say the Games are Canada’s to those who say they are Vancouver’s was about three to one — but think they represent a defining moment in national history.

From coast to coast to coast, Canadians erupted in an outburst of enthusiasm that astonished even Olympics organizers, who frankly admitted they’d underestimated the depth and intensity of the response.

It wasn’t just the expected crowds cheering on skaters, skiers, curlers and hockey players or the good-natured throngs of international visitors mingling with local inhabitants who seemed determined to welcome the tourists and show them a good time.

Although Quebecers told pollsters they didn’t plan to flaunt Canada’s colours and were cool to overt expressions of nationalism, when they gathered at local watering holes to root for hometown heroes like figure skater Joannie Rochette and skier Alexandre Bilodeau, there was plenty of red and white to be seen.

Elsewhere there was no reserve. Red mittens, T-shirts, sweaters, head gear, scarves and jackets blossomed from frigid Hay River in the Northwest Territories, home to biathlon athlete Brendan Green, to Prince Edward Island, a province with a population smaller than Richmond.

Olympics regalia could be spotted from pristine Canmore in the Alberta Rockies to smoky Sudbury in Ontario’s nickel belt and from the Whistler of freestyle skiers to the Winnipeg of speed-skating heroines.

What galvanized this response? In retrospect, it seems likely that the catalyst was the decision to have the torch relay pass through every province and territory from the remote High Arctic to the biggest urban aggregations.

The torch passed through more than 1,000 communities on its 45,000-kilometre journey, a distance equal to the circumference of the earth with an extra trip across Canada tossed in for good measure. It passed within an hour’s drive of 90 per cent of the population and was passed from one Canadian to another 12,000 times.

With television providing sustained coverage for almost a third of a year and a million Canadians applying to carry the torch, each community was exposed to growing anticipation and then a local realization of the festive event.

This simple experience appears to have had a profound psychological effect, perhaps because it linked so many in such a vast country not only in symbolic terms, but physically, too — tangible evidence that whatever else the Olympics may have been to critics, they were also a remarkable unifying force in a country of often fractured and regionalized national identity.

In that sense, perhaps the ordinary citizens polled from Labrador to Vancouver Island are right and the Vancouver Games of 2010 that they took to their hearts as never before were, indeed, a defining national moment.

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